Dales New Years article

My sister Dale is a reporter amongst other hats she wears for Kamloops this Week. I wanted to share the story she wrote......Love you Dale.


Here’s a New Year’s resolution — celebrate your family

By Dale Bass - Kamloops This Week
Published: December 30, 2010 1:00 PM
Updated: December 30, 2010 1:38 PM

Every New Year’s Eve for the past decade, I’ve called my sister and her husband to wish them the best for the coming 12 months.

The call won’t be happening this year — at least, not the way it has since my big sister reunited with the family she lost when she was adopted as an infant.

Bryon isn’t there. He’s stuck in Montana, in the mind of my sister, a recent widow.

Even using that word is difficult because it implies no spouse and Bryon remains a very real husband to my sis.

Christmas was hard for her, even with her kids and grandkids around, because someone wasn’t around.

Tonight will be hard for her not because the two of them partied to greet the coming year, but because they shared the night together.

I liked Bryon the minute I met him — or, rather, didn’t meet him, as he dropped his wife off at the home of the sister she was about to meet, gave her a big hug and left the two of us alone to work through the almost 50 lost years.

I really liked him when, less than a year later, I drove to their home in Richmond to celebrate a birthday — her 50th — with my big sister.

Bryon treated me like I’d been a part of the family forever, a welcome reality as my sister’s children came to meet this stranger and, well-meaning that they were, left me feeling like an exhibit in a museum.

My brother-in-law greeted my two sons who went with me on the trip like the nephews they should have been — kids who were looking for something to do while mom visited — and took them out in the yard to play on the swings and check out the marsh behind their home.

I never asked Bryon what he would think as my sister continued her years-long quest to find the family she knew was out there.

She spent so much time and money hiring investigators to track down her birth parents, no so much to meet them, although that was always a possibility, but to learn about their medical histories, so she could better understand her own.

My sister has told me he never really questioned her about it, never challenged her on it, but always supported her.

It takes a special person to do that, to be there while someone you love is continuing down a strange road to an unknown destination where only strangers will be found.

Had he not earned a place in my heart by then, he certainly did when my sister, having finally found her birth family, flew back to my hometown and called my/her mother, asking to meet her.

My mother told her to go home, something I cannot understand or forgive.

Bryon told my tearful sister, when she called him, to come home, something I understand completely.

She didn’t, mother relented and, eventually, the two of them reached some sort of peace where they could at least become friends.

Bryon was her rock through all of this.

And then he got sick, very sick, and, barely weeks later, he, well, went to Montana.

My sister was again left looking for reasons, something she wrote about in a blog (manicblackdawg.blogspot.com) she started when the cancer was diagnosed.

It’s painful to read, as my sister works through her anger, her confusion, her frustration and, eventually, her new reality — but it’s not as painful as what she experiences every day now.

So, I’m not sure if I’m calling her tonight. I’ve tried to call when I think she needs to hear my stupid jokes — a week after his death, days after Christmas, the times when people might not be there to help her through.

She won’t be making any resolutions tonight — not that she is the kind of person to do that, anyhow.

But, perhaps the rest of us could skip the “I’ll diet,” or “I’ll exercise more” promises we’re going to break and make one that we can stick with.

Resolve tonight to love your own rock — because you never know when that foundation that keeps you going will be gone.

dale@kamloopsthisweek.com